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How Complete Freedom Fuels Creativity and Independence
Sometimes we did dumb things — but we survived.
When my sister and I were raising our kids, we marveled at the things we used to do, and get away with, that mothers in the ’80s and ’90s would never have dreamed of — including both of us. As kids, we had more or less total freedom, and so did our brothers. So did most of the kids in our small-town neighborhood. We got up and made our own breakfasts. We scrounged what we could for lunch, often inviting our friends to raid the refrigerator, with us. Then, we watched late-afternoon TV, while waiting for a responsible adult to return home and fix us Hamburger Helper and an obligatory canned vegetable — or on Friday nights, a TV dinner. Sometimes we did dumb things, but that wasn’t typical. And we survived. I guess, in a way, it was “free-range parenting,” before it had a label.
If our bike tires were flat, we walked our bikes to the local service station. Only rarely did we ask an older sibling to help us get a slipped chain back on the gears. We walked en mass a couple of miles to the…
